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Month: November 2010

Any regular readers here will know how I feel about Xmas and pretty much any other religious festival. Or any religion for that matter. But I do try to enter into the spirit of a small part of Xmas, that being the whole hanging out with family and sharing gifts thing. Of course, that’s actually nothing to do with the Christ Mass that the holiday is based upon, but the Christians only stole the Roman Sol Invictus festival anyway, so it’s all bollocks. My point is, at this time of year we try to get together with loved ones and share gifts and food. That’s a good thing.

I don’t have much in the way of family these days, but I have my in-laws, who are all very nice people to be around, and I have friends that are as close, if not closer, than family. Catching up with these people and having a big feed, spending time together, sharing gifts, it’s all very important and enjoyable stuff. I always hope that during this time some of the stuff I get will be books. And it usually is. As far as I’m concerned, there are few better gifts than a book. I’m sure I could think of some things I’d rather have than a book, but this is not the place to explore my fantasties – you can read my novels for that.

I also plan to give away a lot of books this year. I dig giving people a book as a gift that I know, or at least suspect very strongly, that they’ll really like. Perhaps one of the biggest drawbacks of the current ebook revolution is that we won’t have so many solid books to wrap up in silly paper and hand over as presents. Regardless, in the meantime, I’ll still be giving a lot of books as gifts this Xmas.

Which brings me to another point. I’ve decided to start giving books away all the time. I’m basically starting a new policy as from this Xmas. If anyone asks me if they can borrow any particular book from now on, I’m not going to lend it to them. I’m going to give it to them. If it’s a special book, a rare or limited edition, or a signed copy or something like that, then I’ll say no, they can’t borrow it. If it’s just a book that anyone can still buy off the shelf, I’ll give it to them. If I really like it, I’ll get myself another one, or look out for it in secondhand bookstores.

Now, don’t immediately think to abuse my new found book philanthropy and start asking me for books left, right and centre. This is something that will happen naturally. Someone sees a book in my house, expresses an interest, asks if they can borrow it and I’ll say, “Here, have it.” I think that’ll make everyone involved feel good and the book goes on to do its thing for more people instead of just sitting on a shelf.

There’s this meme going around Facebook at the moment, so I thought I’d drag it out of the social network and onto my blog. It’s pretty flawed, as these things always are, but interesting nonetheless. (Although I am confused by 14 and 98 – bit of a cock up there). Anyway, it goes like this:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Isn’t this part of the Chronicles of Narnia? It’s the 14/98 situation all over again. This really isn’t a very well thought out list…

37) The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40) Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41) Animal Farm – George Orwell

42) The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43) One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45) The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46) Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47) Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48) The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49) Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50) Atonement – Ian McEwan

51) Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52) Dune – Frank Herbert

53) Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54) Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55) A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56) The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57) A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58) Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60) Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61) Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62) Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63) The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64) The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65) Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66) On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67) Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68) Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69) Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70) Moby Dick – Herman Melville – Yep, I’m one of those people that’s actually read this whole book. I now know far too much about whales.

71) Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72) Dracula – Bram Stoker

73) The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74) Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75) Ulysses – James Joyce

76) The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77) Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78) Germinal – Emile Zola

79) Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackera

80) Possession – AS Byatt

81) A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82) Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83) The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84) The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85) Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86) A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87) Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I’ve read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, so I assume this is one of them. Is this an omnibus edition or something?

90) The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91) Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92) The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93) The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94) Watership Down – Richard Adams

95) A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96) A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97) The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98) Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100) Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

That’s not a bad result, I suppose. Certainly more than six. But I do question the list. Including “complete works” or series, then adding another item which is a book from that series is a bit redundant and shows quite a lack of thought and planning in the list. But there you go. The list did at least make me notice a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to read but still haven’t, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Tag!

EDIT: Thanks to Trudi Canavan in the comments for pointing out that the list from Facebook is not, in fact, the same as the original list from the BBC, which you can read here. Which is also out of date, having been last updated in August 2004. Ah, the internet is a minefield of “almost”.

In a quick bit of nonsense news from teh intertubes, my mate Graham pointed out to me that Facebook are trying to trademark the word “Face”. According to the news article:

The Facebook empire has just had a trademark application accepted for any use of the word “Face” in any product or service that could remotely be seen as offering any kind of competition to the all-conquering social network.

Specifically, the trademark covers “telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars”.

None relating to cars, mind you. Oh no, car social networks can use “Face” as much as they like. For some reason.

Facebook now has to provide the US Patent & Trademark Office with a statement of use within three months. Presumably their statement of use will be something along the lines of, “We use it as half of our name.”

Of course, it seems to me, as the original article points out, that this is a direct attack on Steve Jobs and Apple, targetting their whole Facetime thing. After Google and Facebook came to blows last week over Google refusing Facebook users direct connection to their Contacts list, and now this, I’m sitting back and popping me some corn. Seriously, when Google, Apple and Facebook finally get together to settle this thing, it’ll make Godzilla versus King Kong versus King Ghidorah seem like a schoolyard noogiefest.

Independent Inkwell: Australian Small Publishing is a half hour documentary delving into the motivations and stories of small and independent publishers. It’s a fascinating bit of television, not least because I’m in it. Wearing my small press publisher hat rather than my writer hat I was asked to participate on behalf of Blade Red Press. Several Australian small and independent presses are involved, including Keith Stevenson of coeur de lion publishing, another spec fic specialist that I’ve talked about here a lot in the past.

The documentary is made by Max Rowan and was originally shown on TVS. It’s now been uploaded to YouTube in three parts, each around 8 minutes (the half hour includes commercials, obviously, that aren’t in the YouTube version.) While it’s focussed on Australian small press, everything said applies to indie publishing worldwide. There’s also some talk about the crossover with small press, indie press and self-publishing. It’s really interesting viewing and above everything else left me feeling very positive for the future of small press and very proud of the small press community, here and overseas. Viva la revolution!

I’m often entertained by notices in public places, from street signs to restaurant menus and everything in between. Sometimes it’s a case of English as a second language creating the funnies. Other times it’s people trying too hard to say the right thing. After Freecon this Saturday a bunch of us went out for dinner and I found some comments on a menu that seem to be the result of both these things.

The photo hasn’t come out all that well unfortunately. It’s the red bits that made me laugh. The one at the bottom under Spaghetti Vongole says:

There is so much wrong with this sentence. First and foremost, what the fuck is Sea Matter? That could mean anything from a shark to a turd. Also, notice that extreme preparation goes into preparing that dish. Is that preparation while bungee jumping or something?

And it was a night for weird wordage. While at the restaurant I was sending an email from my iPhone about the board game High Frontier. I made a slight typo in the word “boardgame” and look what the old Autocorrect suggested:

That’s right Apple. You won’t show boobs in any of your applications, but you’ll jump at the chance to suggest “bisexuals” when I’ve typed “biardgame”.

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"Memory, prophecy and fantasy - the past, the future and the dreaming moment between - are all one country, living one immortal day.
To know that is Wisdom.
To use it is the Art." - The Great and Secret Show (Clive Barker)

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